CHICAGO — Amid ongoing uncertainty around funding for the National Institutes of Health, and what it could mean for U.S. innovation, a top Merck executive stressed that the agency is “an incredible super-highway for biomedicine,” and that it’s “a fragile thing.”
The comments by Dean Li, Merck’s head of research and development, were made during a STAT event late Friday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and came as the Trump administration proposed deep budget cuts to the NIH.
Li stopped short of criticizing the administration’s effort to shrink the NIH and suggested it’s too soon to draw conclusions. “I’m hopeful that the noise will settle down, and the true value, which is not hard to see, will be seen,” he said. “But if it isn’t, it can cause a problem, and you will have a shift of basic research.”
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